Death in Berlin (1955) by M. M. Kaye

 

M.M. Kaye is well-known for her historical novels but I was unaware that she also had written six crime novels which are set in various locations. Kaye’s marriage to a British Army soldier meant that she travelled extensively and was able to use her experience of living in different locations in her writing. 

Death in Berlin (first published as Death Walks in Berlin) is set in the Berlin of 1953, eight years after WWII. Kaye and her husband were stationed in the city in the post war years and witnessed the erection of the Berlin Wall. They returned in later years and barely recognised the city as most of the ruins had disappeared from the British sector. 

Kaye describes Berlin as she saw it in 1953. As she took long walks through the leafy suburbs between Herr Strasse and the Grunewald and saw the ruined roofless houses where the Nazi elite used to live, she thought up the plot for her book. She made notes and wrote detailed descriptions of the ruined city, and made rough sketches of the stadium that Hitler had built in the 1930’s. This was used for the Olympic Games in 1936 and afterwards for a multitude of Nazi rallies. 

Post-war Berlin was a splendid setting for a murder mystery and the author’s familiarity with the city in the years after the war prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall creates an authentic atmosphere. 

The story opens at Dunkirk in 1940 with a group of refugees making their way to a fishing boat in a bid to escape to England. A young girl clinging to her doll is one of the refugees who makes it onto the boat, but one woman gets left behind in the scramble to get to the boat. Once the refugees reached England it was discovered that the young girl’s parents had been killed when the Germans attacked Belgium and that she was not French, as everyone imagined, but English. 

Years later, twenty-one-year-old Miranda Brand accepted an invitation from her cousin, Robert and his wife, Stella, to travel by train with them to Berlin and have a month’s holiday with them there. One of their travelling companions, Brigadier Brindley, told a story at dinner of a fortune in cut diamonds that was supposedly smuggled out of Germany in 1940. This proved to be the Brigadier's undoing...

That night, as the train rumbled on its way, Miranda could not sleep. She got up to get herself a cup of water and as she returned, the train rocked on a curve which made her stumble through her cabin door in the dark. Reaching out her hand & not finding her berth, she quickly realised she was in the wrong room. She had stumbled into the Brigadier’s compartment. Fortunately, he was sound asleep, and she left immediately and found her own compartment.  Sitting on her berth she thought how stupid she’d been and then she noticed that she had blood on her dressing gown and on the floor where she had walked. The Brigadier had been murdered and the prime suspect was Miranda who literally had blood on her hands. 

It was not only the sight of a murdered man that has brought those days back, dragging them out of that dark attic in her mind into which her conscious and subconscious mind had thrust them. She should never come here, to this shattered city where the very language in the streets tugged at shadowy memories that were better forgotten. 

I enjoyed this book although I didn’t think some of the characters were sufficiently developed - Miranda’s love interest, for example, but I’m keen to read more of Kaye's work. The ending was very unexpected and surprised me and as she reminded me a little of Mary Stewart, I'd be happy to explore her more thoroughly. I'm annoyed I can't find any of her books in the library and was stunned to randomly pick up Death in Berlin for a dollar!

Kaye was born to British parents in India and lived there until she was ten when she was sent to boarding school in England. She never expected to return but she met and married a British Indian Army officer who was transferred to the British Army when the Indian regiment was disbanded.

A few months before we left, The Wall went up. And with its rise many fond hopes for the future of humanity came tumbling down. I watched it being built: which is possibly why, when I look back, I think that I prefer the battered but more hopeful Berlin of 1953.